Refined by Fire

There’s been much contemplation as to what to call these… whatevers who follow 1000s of people on twitter, but with few followers. In a previous post, calling them a “spwitter” was an idea, but I agree, that was a little too cute and there’s very little cuteness about these… whatevers. “Spit” (spam + twit) is a good name for it. It’s nasty; it should have a nasty name.

There’s actually a real word that matches up closely: “twaddle”

twaddle |?twädl| informal
noun trivial or foolish speech or writing; nonsense : he dismissed the novel as self-indulgent twaddle.

Frankly, I still have yet to figure out what they’re doing with these feeds. They do have some followers, but they’re likely just other follow-bots like themselves.

Well, anyway, found a useful site if you want to see the stats of the folks following you. It has a great name for these… twerps: TwerpScan. That’s such a great name them.

It’s useful, but does take a little while to zap out your twerps because every block prompts you with an “are you sure?” back at your twitter site. That’s not a total deal breaker, though. Just have to come back to it chunks.

Hope that helps!
Update: Here’s a more helpful run-down of how it works.